Part 1: Suspended sentence
Part 2: How things work out
Translator's Note

A monumental horror novel by Joyce Carol Oates, a leading American female writer who montages a nightmarish reality with extreme imagination.

『Zombie: The Story of a Murderer』 is a horror novel written by Joyce Carol Oates, a representative American female writer and a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year, that explores the inner self of a murderer based on the story of real-life psychopathic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
Jeffrey Dahmer, nicknamed the “Milwaukee Cannibal,” shocked the world with his atrocities, including killing seventeen innocent civilians and mutilating and displaying their bodies. He was beaten to death by another inmate in 1994 while incarcerated.


Known as an author who goes beyond the violence and destruction that leads to self-destruction and the absurdity of the world to depict the depths of humanity, Otsu shockingly depicts the extreme, grotesque, and violent life of a single human being in this work.
A thirty-one-year-old psychopath who attempted to perform brain surgery on a kidnapped person and turn him into a good slave (zombie) who would obey his master.
This horror novel by Oates, which mixes fact and fiction, was evaluated as a problematic work that symbolizes not only the story of an individual but also the greedy and fanatic society and the giant monster that is America, and it also won the Bram Stoker Award in 1996.


The lobotomy (frontal lobotomy) that the protagonist Quentin performed with an ice pick was actually a type of brain surgery that was performed in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Many patients who underwent this surgery suffered from serious personality changes or lost their lives. Afterwards, controversy arose over side effects and human rights violations, and the procedure was completely banned.
Michael Dirda writes in the New York Review of Books, "Oates's central themes are racism, anti-Semitism, infidelity, alcoholism, religious fanaticism, sexism, working-class despair, and mania leading to murder.
After all, this is the world we live in.
“Ots has a remarkable ability to draw unfortunate or evil characters, and he takes us into some very dark places, even if we are caught up in it,” he said.

“Are you sure your neighbor, your brother, and you are not Quentin?”

This novel, which captures a chilling imagination driven to extremes in a gloomy narrative, is told in the form of a first-person diary.
The intimate confession, which seems to be whispered low, continues across the fragmented time of past and present, along with rough drawings, and Otsu's characteristically cold and unadorned style sends out ominous signals floating within the protagonist's mind as if stabbing him.
In particular, the map he drew while planning his crime evokes a more chilling sense of fear than any other text, and his handwriting habits, such as writing certain letters noticeably smaller or drawing lines instead of periods over initials of his own or others' names, are meaningful as if they symbolize an abnormal and split personality.
As the reader reads his diary, he feels as if he is wearing 3D glasses and looking into the mind of a murderer, and is sucked into a cold well of evil.
Standing in the middle of it all, you become a serial killer, harboring vain hopes and becoming angry at the world that doesn't go your way.
The title 'Zombie' is not a metaphor or a symbol, but is used literally to represent the protagonist's life goal.
This novel, which does not even allow the imagination to catch its breath, creates an overwhelming sense of fear through atmosphere alone, more than any other novel that describes the whole crime in detail and shockingly. By depicting a perfectly normal human being hiding behind a terrifyingly abnormal incident, this novel proves the cruel reality that two worlds, two personalities, coexist face to face.
As we close the novel and take off the stereoscopic glasses of Quentin's world, we might ask ourselves these questions.
“Are you sure your neighbor, your brother, and you are not Quentin?”